


Trick of the Light (The Lining Is Silver Remix)

by lost_spook



Category: Sapphire and Steel
Genre: Angst, Character Death, Gen, Post-Assignment Six, Remix
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-04-23
Updated: 2012-04-23
Packaged: 2017-11-04 04:28:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,004
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/389749
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lost_spook/pseuds/lost_spook
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sapphire and Steel can sit out eternity; but one thing Silver cannot do is wait forever.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Trick of the Light (The Lining Is Silver Remix)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [AstroGirl](https://archiveofourown.org/users/AstroGirl/gifts).
  * Inspired by [Time in a Bottle](https://archiveofourown.org/works/296167) by [AstroGirl](https://archiveofourown.org/users/AstroGirl/pseuds/AstroGirl). 



> Please note that, like the story this remixes, this takes place after Assignment Six and is therefore spoilery for the final serial.
> 
> Three lines (in italics) are taken directly from the original fic; a marvellously perfect Sapphire & Steel story I should certainly have left alone. 
> 
> (I hope the intention of this comes across - I'm a little worried in case it doesn't and I seem to have stepped over the bounds of a remix. Please bear with me. It is Madness.)

***

_They sit across from each other, at a table strewn with chess pieces. There is nothing left for them to do._

***

It is always the first moments that are the worst; the first few years that are the hardest to bear. Or so he assumes, because it would not do to think it will get worse.

He cannot remember precisely what happened, not in that final instant. It is a disconcerting, alien feeling. It is not-Silver.

There are questions. There would have to be. They are gone, which is another disorientating thing. Time is empty of Sapphire, and of Steel. A fixed mark has been removed from the universe. And so, there are questions, and he is watched; he is unreliable. Silver, tarnished; for a time.

It is reasonable, even he admits, to _wonder_ , when three set out and only one returns. One, he also admits, is a terribly lonely number. 

*

In between times, he plays chess with Mercury. He loses for the first time in five hundred and forty-three years, but it is not the last time. The other technician tells him his heart is not in the game.

Silently, Silver agrees. Everything changes, with time. Even he changes. Aloud, all he says, however, is that Mercury’s habit of cheating has grown decidedly worse over the last century. And then deflects anything further with his brightest smile, and asks if Mercury has heard of something called Monopoly. It sounds, he says, more entertaining than chess.

Losing, he tells Sapphire later, isn’t any fun, either. She isn’t listening. She will never hear him again, but sometimes he thinks he can hear her. It is only an echo in his mind, and she talks to Steel, not to him, but he finds it comforting.

***

_"Perhaps Silver..." she says._

_"No," he says._

***

Years pass, and he is needed. Pragmatism outweighs wariness. Naturally. He is brilliant, he shines, he dazzles the others. He amuses himself in any way that he can, and, oh, he _can_. He is Silver, and there is always everything to be done.

If, in private, he wastes his time constructing odd little boxes that never will work, what is that to the rest?

*

Doubt is yet another alien thing: a tiny parasite that grows and lives within. Doubt and fear; they are also corrosive substances that eat their way through him. All they need is time, and he has more time than most.

He cannot remember the ending of that assignment. Was there an unknowing betrayal? Silver, after everything, merely a tawdry distraction?

That, of course, is impossible. Indignation shapes the memory in his mind at last and he is sheepish, rueful. He had done what he had always done, and slid out of danger if he could: he had ducked.

Silver laughs.

*

Time marches onwards, like a soldier, forcibly removing him from the place where he left them. 

He sees them in the stars, for reasons he cannot explain. They are out there, waiting. It feels oddly certain; a truth beyond logic. He can picture them quite easily: Steel, outwardly still but inwardly a restless caged strength that could shatter the walls of the trap, given one weakness. Sapphire… beautiful, formidable Sapphire is capable of waiting forever. The two of them have each other. Sapphire and Steel. That is all they need.

Every now and again, they are there in his mind, for a moment. 

They will always be there; he comes to believe that. And if that is so, then perhaps Time cannot win, not in the end.

*

Silver cannot evade Time forever. When It corners him in the dark, he is ready. He has, he finds, if he will admit the truth to himself, out-danced the enemy for longer than he wished. 

His fate is shorter, surer, more final than theirs.

For the first time in years, he glimpses them again. His latest sight is of the stars on this, his terminal night, as he blows them an unseen kiss in farewell, and fades and breaks and crumbles away with one last mocking smile for the world.

***

_"It might not be forever," Steel says. "Eventually the universe will end. We might be free, then."_

*

A new universe is built from the fragments of the old. The same atoms in new formations.

Sapphire and Steel know this. Time has not been the only thing absent from their holding cell. The presence of other Elements, no matter how distant, had been another constant that they could no longer sense. The isolation from everything but each other had been complete.

Sapphire had played with each item in the café over and over – each item that had not only lied about its own origin (it was not 1948; it had never been 1948 here) but had refused to speak to her of those others. She had said their names aloud, or from her mind to his every once in a while (a year, a decade, a century, a millennium, there was no longer any way to tell); a litany of a kind. Or perhaps only as one more thing with which to break the silence, with no more meaning than a nursery rhyme: _Gold, Lead, Copper, Jet, Diamond, Radium, Mercury…_

The trap fades away at last. Time has not won, after all. 

And now, whatever is ahead of them, whatever is being formed, or will be formed, the traces are there again. The fundamental elements remain. She smiles and murmurs the names, almost without thought, as she recognises their presence one by one. Steel lifts his head at the sound, and they watch the shifting colours, hand in hand. This time, the last name no longer goes unspoken: she says it aloud, as if a question asked aeons ago has finally been answered.

_Silver._

For a moment, one instant, standing together in the remains of what was, and looking towards the unfamiliar brightness of what is to come, they see him in the stardust – but it is only a strange trick of the light.

***


End file.
